May 21
Got 31 seconds to kill?
This opera has everything. Murder, intrigue,eunuchs, David Hockney designed sets, forced perspective, And who doesn't love Nessun Dorma? I've never wanted to be in Los Angeles more than right now. Puccini's "Turindot" playing as we speak..
A tiny presence that changed the nature of the days
Even in a labyrinth with terrifying tall walls, where the ocean is no longer visible, a minotaur still needs a hummingbird, essential company in the endless journey through dead-ends, restarts, and new beginnings – as well as a reminder of the beauty of the world, the power of the sun, the rain, love, and life, all packed inside the body of a creature that weighs less than an ounce. A sign that within the smallest detail, the whole world is present, and just as the gravity and magnificence of life is present in the mountains, oceans, stars, and everything larger than life, it is also brilliantly present in its smallest bird. from Hummingbirds Are Wondrous by Zito Madu [Plough]
Here's Alex Brundle, interviewing one of the cars
Autonomous car racing is a bit of a mess. A slightly sarcastic overview of the first ever Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League event (previously)
May 20
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe Reporting by Sharon Lerner for ProPublica.
A full pro-shot show from my favorite era of Prince!
Prince - Sign O’ The Times (Live at Paisley Park 12/31/87) [2h12m, Vimeo]. Setlist and band member list from PrinceVault. Miles Davis guests on trumpet for the encore.
Got 7 Hours to kill?
Midsommar - The Complete Guide (Everything Explained) from Youtuber Novum. (slyt 7hr vid) Deep dive into Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film, Midsommar.
'The Bill Mitchell era'
Bill Mitchell was "responsible for creating or influencing the design of over 72.5 million automobiles produced by GM, Mitchell spent the entirety of his 42-year career in automobile design at General Motors". Bill Mitchell’s Silver Arrow I. In 1957, coming back from the Turin Auto Show Mitchell faced "Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA) had forbidden American automakers from participating in any performance or motorsports activities—which included the building, selling, or advertising of performance-oriented products."
Studio X: The Story of Bill Mitchell's Secret Styling Studio at General Motors.
“You know, this car is becoming a curse to us.”
The story of the 1967 Ferguson Super Sport, the product of a Canadian couple's years of obsessive planning and labour. [Mod Note: if access is denied, try refreshing, opening a second time, or opening in new window]
It Free. It's a Thread. C'mon in.
A favorite moment of perfect comedic timing from The Muppets' Seven Deadly Sins/ Sex and Violence. it's safe for work. [more inside]
AI-detic Memory
Microsoft held a live event today showcasing their vision of the future of the home PC (or "Copilot+ PC"), boasting longer battery life, better-standardized ARM processors, and (predictably) a whole host of new AI features built on dedicated hardware, from real-time translation to in-system assistant prompts to custom-guided image creation. Perhaps most interesting is the new "Recall" feature that records all on-screen activity securely on-device, allowing natural-language recall of all articles read, text written, and videos seen. It's just the first foray into a new era of AI PCs -- and Apple is expected to join the push with an expected partnership with OpenAI debuting at WWDC next month. In a tech world that has lately been defined by the smartphone, can AI make the PC cool again?
6969 vs. 8398
The most common four-digit pin numbers [information is beautiful]
Tip your bartender as well
Want to spend an evening at Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge [venue website] in Madison, TN? I have just the night for you: June 9, 2023 [3h10m, main link, subsequent links are to individual segments of this main video]. Sally Jaye will open up with some great storytelling songs for about a half hour, and then the main artist's old friend David Matthew Dorne plays for maybe a bit longer than needed, and finally Brian Wright And The Sneakups take the stage. If you're the type to check out the music in a bar, why not check this out? Brian Wright And The Sneakups previously. [more inside]
Velvety, Wooly, Silky, Magnificent
Intrepid reporter embarks on a quest to pet every breed in the Westminster Dog Show. (SL Washington Post article; gift link, no subscription required.)
"It is a recognition that neoliberalism failed to deliver."
A New Centrism is Rising in Washington (NYT gift)
Tough little birds
Thinking of a career change?
Like old-school technology? The last typewriter shop in the Boston area is for sale.
Individual games weren’t as important as the larger game that emerged
“When you first start out playing Magic, when you're playing with kids in the schoolyard or around the kitchen table with cards that your older brother played with, that is the way it works. Your friend will have a card you don't have. But when you enter the store system, then that's no longer the way it works, you just get many, many more cards, to the point where the magical aspect of having unique cards which nobody else has goes away.” from The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong [Defector; ungated]
May 19
Dog using her nose to save a critically endangered mushroom
In a forest in Melbourne's east, Daisy is drawn to the smell of something barely bigger than a grain of rice. Daisy is thought to be the only dog in the world using her nose to save a critically endangered mushroom.
Humans have to make meaning out of a seemingly chaotic existence
"Individually an audience might be comprised of idiots, collectively they are never wrong." The New Yorker interviews Academy Award-winning director George Miller [ungated] about filmmaking, editing, and working with his wife and collaborator Margaret Sixel on Furiosa.
It Is Known
What Game of Thrones means to today’s television-makers, 5 years after the finale - includes writers from Shogun, Wheel of Time, BSG (and DS9) and more.
CW: descriptions of sexual aggression, harassment, and abuse
Spacey Unmasked [Wikipedia] is a Channel 4 documentary about Kevin Spacey's sexual misconduct allegations presented in two parts: Spacey Unmasked Episode 1 of 2 [55m], Spacey Unmasked Episode 2 of 2 [51m]
You know what they say about conservatives and empathy
More on the school teacher art thieves
A stolen Willem de Kooning painting was found in the home of Rita and Jerry Alter after they died (a very worth reading previously). New evidence suggests that's not all they stole. [more inside]
A screaming comes across the sky
Hard landing
Reports hitting the wires of a ‘hard landing’ of helicopter involving Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian
It's About Time, It's About Space
Ed Dwight, (born September 9, 1933 wikipedia) the first black astronaut, goes to space sixty-three years after Kennedy had made him part of the NASA team.
The Indian film at Cannes made by half a million farmers
Parallel cinema maestro Shyam Benegal's acclaimed film Manthan was crowdfunded by half a million small dairy farmers putting in ₹2 each. Nearly a half century later, a newly mastered copy is premiering at Cannes. It tells a fictionalized account of the real-life story of dairy collectivization among poor and exploited small dairy farmers, the story of the famous Amul cooperative. [more inside]
Come for the songs, stay for the songs
Jesse Welles is a singer/songwriter in the protest tradition: War Isn’t Murder; Cancer; Fentanyl; The Olympics; Whistle Boeing; Payola; Happy Mother’s Day; Fat; God, Abraham, and Xanax.
Step into the Closet
The Criterion Collection, a revered distributor of classic and arthouse cinema, built a vast library of 3,500+ films over the last 40 years. It can be overwhelming, even for cinephiles. Want a savvy friend to guide you? Enter Criterion's Closet Picks, a lo-fi YouTube series which invites top filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other artists into the vault to freely sample while musing about core influences, all-time favorites, and hidden gems. Highlights:
Willem Dafoe -
Maya + Ethan Hawke -
The Daniels (EEAAO) -
Richard Ayoade -
Comic Patton Oswalt -
Yo La Tengo -
Cinematographers Roger + James Deakins -
Charlie Day -
Nathan Lane -
John Waters -
VG designer Hideo Kojima -
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) -
Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek) -
Cauleen Smith (Drylongso) -
Animator Floyd Norman -
Jane Schoenbrun -
Paul Giamatti -
Marc Maron -
Wim Wenders -
Cate Blanchett + Todd Field -
Hari Nef -
Photographer Tyler Mitchell -
Molly Ringwald -
Peter Sarsgaard -
Udo Kier -
Gael García Bernal -
Pixar's Lee Unkrich -
Singer St. Vincent -
Critic Elvis Mitchell -
Anna Karina -
Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) -
Flying Lotus -
Agnès Varda -
Alfonso Cuarón + Paweł Pawlikowski -
Mary Harron -
Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman -
Carl Franklin -
Roger Corman -
Michael K. Williams -
SNL's Bill Hader
// Watch the full playlist, or see this cool database of picks (info), including the most popular.
The real life Lady Whistledown scandalised 18th-century society
The Guardian: Like the fictional pamphlet from Bridgerton, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746 (here in archive.org) , has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.
A prolific anti-racist, proto-feminist writer, Haywood used her transgressive newsletter to expose 18th-century hypocrisies about race and gender. It was published weekly over nine issues. [more inside]
This is not a post about lying in fiction or games
Some say that lying non-player characters can motivate player characters, at the cost of paranoia. Some say that characters in crime fiction may be justified in their dishonesty. Marvel comic books are full of liars. Psychology experts have advice for you about how to spot liars. Some recent research has addressed factors associated with designing video games with falsehoods.
A relevant previous Ask. [more inside]
That's Hommy, not Tommy
"Orchestra Harlow's answer to the Who's Tommy -- Hommy, A Latin Opera [YT playlist], and one of the few concept albums we know from the New York Latin scene of the time! [Dusty Groove] The tracks are fairly short, and they're separated by short "interludes" throughout the album that feature some cool spoken bits that trace the story of the record...although Orchestra Harlow borrow the name of the Who's album, the work here is all original -- not covers -- two long "acts", spread out over the sides of the record with a sophisticated approach that shows the Harlow group moving into much deeper territory at the time." [more inside]
The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel
Jenny Nicholson's latest video is live, it's a 4 hour review retrospective of Disney's Star Wars Hotel.
Long after we are gone, our data will be what remains of us
In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It’s an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World
Research into dingoes in the ACT
Little is known about the dingoes living in the Australian Capital Territory, but one researcher is trying to change that. Concerns have been raised over the current assumptions about the ACT's dingoes, and its hoped more understanding can help the animals coexist with humans and other species.
May 18
How To Live Forever
The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse. [New Yorker / Archive]
Right To The City
YouTube channel Radical Planning recently posted Third Place vs. Right to the City [50m] which digs into the theory of cities mostly from a Marxist point of view. Ray Oldenberg, the founder of Third Place Theory, is discussed, and dissed, and then Right To The City as a concept is introduced and discussed. I found it to be informative and interesting and well-sourced.
“National Geographic’s Picture Atlas of Our Universe”
Nerd John Siracusa reminisced about a certain National Geographic book from his childhood and the reactions flooded in. Siracusa says the cover image is “burned in his brain,” more than 40 years later. Nearly everyone who responded also had fond memories of the book. One respondent said he had written a blog post about in 2009. [more inside]
The fish did not respond to a request for comment ...
Faith No More was one of the most influential bands in the 1990s. The song and video for Epic was a hit in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Like many songs, it was about sexual frustration. They weren't the first to mix rap and metal, but they are the ones who have to apologize for it.
But about that fish ... [more inside]
He was stupid. But I was already in love with him.
On average, marriages around the world don’t last terribly long. The average is eight years in the United States. Ten years in Singapore. Five years in France. And the key reasons couples cite for divorcing are always the same: extramarital affairs. Lack of intimacy. Lack of commitment. Add to that the stresses of work. Especially if your work is having sex with other people. From RIP Jose and Daniele Duval: Enduring, Forever Love [The Rialto Report] (NSFW photos and text)
English as she was Spoke
In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says “I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced”. [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] “a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering” [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Jacques Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"
Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
Podcast (2:42:24) with transcript. Christopher Brown is a professor at Columbia specializing in the slave trade and abolition. He argues that abolition, though obvious in retrospect, was not inevitable and relied on a particular set of circumstances that could have been disrupted at many points. He has also written about Arming Slaves and has an interesting review of Capitalism and Slavery at LRB.
The “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” is dead.
NPR reporting that actor Dabney Coleman is dead at 92. Dabney Coleman was practically ubiquitous in the early to mid 80’s by appearing in films like 9 to 5, Tootsie, Cloak and Dagger, On Golden Pond, and War Games. [more inside]
Time Is Shaped Like a Labyrinth
Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults is a short film in 4 parts by Yara Asmar, a musician, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Beirut. The creator describes it so: "In a wonky universe set within the fake walls of an old abandoned children’s TV show, Mr Samuel and his friends -peculiar, ugly puppets navigating the strange thing that is time- attempt to make sense of it all through stories, songs and arduous loops of nonsensical chores." [more inside]
Procedural Artificial Narrative using Gen AI for Turn-Based Video Games
"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)." [more inside]
How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder
How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder. Class, nativism and gender stereotypes all played a role in Borden’s acquittal for the 1892 killings of her father and stepmother. (Smithsonian magazine.)
"It’s not for everyone, but it’s a good life."
He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]
May 17
Children in a rural New Zealand school sing about their community
The song Our Toanga by the Sea has been produced by the children and wider community of Hampden [map link], and it's simply a nice look at a rural New Zealand South Island coastal settlement (on Highway 1 just North of Dunedin).
I think this has come out at the right time as (most of) the people of NZ are very worried about the new government. We need to remind ourselves of what we have so we can move forward again - this song I think will help.
Toanga in the song name is Māori for treasure
Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand.
The online Māori Dictionary is an extraordinary resource with a nice format, all about the words of our place.
Make Anim(ation) Real
Over 15 years ago, Microsoft released Photosynth [previously], a nifty tool that could correlate dozens of photos of the same place from different angles in order to make a sort of virtual tour using photogrammetry, a technique that went on to influence Google Earth's 3D landscapes and virtual reality environments. But what if you tried the same thing with cartoons? Enter Toon3D, a novel approach to applying photogrammetry principles to hand-drawn animation. The results are imperfect due to the inherent inconsistency of drawn environments, but it's still rather impressive to see a virtual camera moving around glitched-out versions of the Krusty Krab, Bojack Horseman's living room, or the train car from Spirited Away. Interestingly, the same approach works about as well on paintings or even AI-generated video; see also the similar technique of neural radiance fields (NERFs) for creating realistic high-fidelity virtual recreations of real (and unreal) environments.
Teruna Jaya (gamelan animated graphical score)
Stephen Malinowski is a YouTuber who makes animated scores, usually of Bach's music, but today I discovered something completely different: his spectacular score for Teruna Jaya, a classic of Balinese gamelan music (12 min.). [more inside]